India’s Primary IT Trade Body Establishes Blockchain Special Interest Group

Indian IT and services industry trade association NASSCOM has set up a special interest group for blockchain technology in the country’s capital, Delhi.

The new special interest group, named Blockchain SIG, will both educate and inform the public about blockchain innovation, while working on different use cases for the technology in both finance and non-financial industries, according to the Economic Times.

Delhi-based blockchain startup BlockSmiths is partnering NASSCOM to install the blockchain-exclusive special interest group. As is Quatrro, a global FinTech services firm with a presence in Asia and the United States.

In statements, Blocksmiths business chief and now founding member of Blockchain SIG Harmeet Singh Mongha said:

We see our partnership to form a SIG with NASSCOM as a wonderful opportunity to develop the Blockchain community in India. We strongly believe that India has the potential to lead the Blockchain revolution in the South East Asian region and help businesses from various industries become highly streamlined and efficient by adopting Blockchain.

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The Blockchain SIG has already held its first meeting with representatives from inaugural member organizations including private banking giant Axis Bank, ‘big four’ accounting firm Deloitte, tech hardware manufacturer Nokia among others.

As things stand, the Blockchain SIG is focusing on four specific core areas for the application and the research of blockchain technology. They are FinTech, Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Contracts and general blockchain applications.

As one of the world’s leading IT services providers with a healthy software-engineering population, India is becoming a hub for blockchain development. On a state level, India’s biggest banks from the public and private sectors launched a financial banking blockchain consortium in February this year. Titled ‘Bankchain’, the working group has already developed a permissioned blockchain that will see its members share KYC, AML and CFT (Know Your Customer, Anti Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism) details on a distributed ledger.